Stuff I Do

I have Comcast for my home internet connection and I have the 16Mb pipe. The cable modem and wireless router sit in the basement and we normally work from the main floor. The problem is that I am not seeing any speed at all on my connection. And by no speed I mean 3Mb down and 400k upload.

If I go straight from the cable modem to my laptop I get over 20Mb down and 1.5Mb up. Crap that kind of points to the router as my problem. It is a Linksys router running the OpenWRT. The reason I am using this firmware instead of the stock is that I wanted to get rid of my internal servers to save power and the last service I needed to provide was internal DNS. OpenWRT gives me that ability. Since I have no other routers anymore to try out, I can either downgrade the firmware to the stock release from Linksys or buy a new router and see what kind of speed I get there.

Arrrrgggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!

UPDATE
So running some tests all through the same router with the same OpenWRT software build on the router.

I have two laptops I am testing with and here are the results:
HP Pavilion ZV5000
Wireless speed: 6Mb
Wired speed: 13Mb

MacBook Pro
Wireless speed: 4Mb
Wired speed: 13Mb

The uploads were all around the 400K speed.

Looks like I need to find a way to tweak the wireless speeds and the upload speeds.

UPDATE #2
On the router I disable the G-Mode Protection settings.
HP Pavilion ZV5000 now at 7Mb
MacBook Pro now at 10Mb

UPDATE #3
Now on the router I have set it to only G mode and got rid B settings.
HP Pavilion ZV5000 no at 9Mb
MacBook Pro now at 11Mb

Don’t think I have any more B mode devices anymore, but that could be an issue if I come across a long forgotten device.

UPDATE #4
Got my uploads figured out now. No longer capped at 400k I am now getting 1.5Mb uploads.
Apparently even though the QoS Service is disabled, there is a setting called QoS Overhead Calculation which by default is on. Once this setting is also disabled, everything uploads quickly.

After all this I kind of feel bad for gripping at the Comcast people on the phone when it was not them that hosed the connection. {blushes} I hate being that jerk.

Learned an important lesson today using Cisco Aironet 1300 Wireless bridges.

We have a new facility about ¼ of a mile away from our current main building and we need to tie the two buildings together with this wireless link. We had a wiring crew put in the coax needed for the power and data to the antennas that are mounted way up in the air. Since heights are nothing the boss or I am fond of, we had the wiring crew attach the antennas to the structure. When we were trying to use the connection it was completely unreliable and no where near the 54Mbs connection that these devices are capable of for up to ¾ of a mile away.

Today we brought out a contractor who took one look at the antenna and said it is mounted the wrong direction. Huh? Here is what I learned, the antenna sends out the signal in what looks to be a sine wave. The antennas need to be oriented in the same position so that the sine waves meet up in the same plane. By this I mean that one antenna was mounted in a vertical direction and the second antenna was in a horizontal direction. So this left a very small portion where the wave would meet up. Leaving us with low signal quality and low signal power. By rotating the antenna by 90 degrees the signal strength tripled and the quality doubled. Instantly the connection was able to produce a consistent 54Mbs with zero loss.

Lessoned learned and hopefully so have you now.

It took me a little while to get both user and computer authentication to work in a wireless security system using RADIUS authentication and certificates for both the user account and machine account. What makes this really cool is that even when a user is not logged in the machine authenticates so that updates and software packages can be installed. It also allows all user logon scripts to be run. No static keys and the way I have mine configured new keys are generated at the most every 10 minutes. A friend had asked if I had documented the process to get it to work. I had not but since have put together this document using all the documents I read to make this process work. Requirements are Windows 2003 and Windows XP and Cisco Access points.

Try the document out and let me know if it works for you or not and what parts I have wrong. This is very possible as I have joined other docs with my own documentation.